***Heather***

Yer courtin’ a grim fate. Anya said, her spirit rustling about inside her anxiously. ‘Tis unwise to not be where they believe you to be.

“I know, alright? I just wanna see some demonic trolls before those two get to hog all the fun.” Heather said, kicking her feet off the side of the towering building, watching the battle with a pair of old-timey binoculars she’d freed from an abandoned sporting goods shop.

Heather had gradually lost her fear of heights ever since she’d figured out how to fly, and the likelihood of a troll coming all the way up to the roof of the building and sneaking up on both her and Anya was slim, so this was about as safe as it got.

Heather was kind of disappointed in Perry and Nat, as she critiqued their battle from a distance. They were taking a strategy that was significantly less flashy than she’d been hoping. Where was the bolts of lightning, the explosions? The tracer rounds, the mushroom clouds?

All they were doing was snagging the trolls one at a time with the black netting and squishing them like ants with Hardcase’s cannon, while flying outside the troll’s range.

I mean, sure, that works, but it’s boring. I should’ve expected this betrayal of my expectations from Periclese, but E tu, Natalus?

Heather’s boredom evaporated when an oversized humanoid figure jumped out of a nearby skyscraper and hit Hardcase’s gun, sending them careening away before shooting himself with the cannon and smashing into Perry at bullet-speeds, the two of them crashing into the building and disappearing inside.

“Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap,” Heather muttered, following Boomer’s tumbling descent as his limbs fell away in another direction, still fused into the cannon.

“Something’s wrong,” Heather whispered under her breath.

Boomer hit the ground in a shower of sparks and smashed to a halt against a nearby concrete building, twitching as the mech’s auxillary thrusters seemed to be having difficulty figuring themselves out.

Shit, what’s going on with Perry? Heather thought, getting to her feet, her heart slamming in her chest.

An explosion rocked the side of the building and the bloody remains of a giant were flung out the twentieth floor of the skyscraper in a shower of glass and office supplies.

“NICE!”

…

Why isn’t he coming out?

Heather glanced back down at Natalie, and saw that she’d popped Boomer’s hood for some insane reason and was using her magnetic gloves to slice and dice the encroaching trolls, desperately pushing them away from Boomer instead of just relying on the mech’s damn-near indestructability.

C’mon, c’mon….

Heather turned her attention back to the hole the giant had exploded out of.

An agonizing few seconds later, Paradox flew out of the building, which was good. He went after the giant instead of rescuing her girlfriend immediately, which was bad.

I gotta do something, Heather thought to herself, her adrenaline surging as she held her hand over her stomach protectively. I need to get down there. I need to give her backup, whatever form it takes…without jeapordizing my passengers.

“Can you get that far away from me, Anya?” Heather asked.

‘I’ve got a better idea, miss.’ Anya said from inside her.

***Hardcase***

The inertia of the spin wrenched a strangled yelp out of Nat’s lungs, but it wasn’t quite enough to qualify as ‘damage’, so she was simply dazed a bit as they slammed against a building. She assumed it was a building. The sensors were down and she couldn’t see what was going on around them. She directed her attention to the instrument panel which was still partially up and running.

“What happened?” Nat asked. “Why did we crash?”

AI core compromised by unknown means. Advanced systems are being managed by remaining cores. Processing power limited until AI hardware reboots, limiting flight calculation capabilities. ETA 5 minutes.

“Are the guns working?” Natalie asked, thinking fast. She needed more information to go on.

Of course.

“How about our sensors?”

Cameras are functional.

“Deploy the gatlings and give me manual control over the thrusters and I’ll drive us out of here.”

She didn’t have to fly the thing. The AI helped with the stabilization, so if she tried to go full-manual, there was a good chance it would spiral off and crash again, especially without Boomer’s limbs to help stabilize. What she could do was slide Boomer along the ground, using the thrusters gently to get her out of the danger zone.

ALERT: Enemy may compromise Boomer via physical contact by unknown means. User is advised to prevent physical contact with the enemy until AI core has rebooted.

THAT’S what happened? In a fraction of a second, Nat’s whole strategy flipped.

“Shit, jettison the hood,” Natalie said, unstrapping herself from the form-fitting pilot seat and running into the back of the cockpit.

BOOM!

The cockpit exploded off and tumbled into the distance, crushing a nearby car, exposing her to the hot summer air of downtown Chicago.

The cameras were working, sure, but they had blind spots right up against boomer’s hull, so she would have to visually confirm there was no one trying to touch the machine.

“I want you to manually control the thrusters and slide us to the northwest!” Natalie shouted, donning her Maglev gloves. “Don’t exceed forty miles an hour!”

“Face us so the gatlings are backwards and use them to slow pursuit!” Natalie shouted, climbing up the maintenance ladder at the back of the cockpit and standing on top of her mech, her boots magnetically locking her in place.

“Acknowledged.” Boomer’s voice said straight into her helmet.

Nat’s heart leapt into her throat as she spotted one of the long-muzzled trolls rushing towards them, approaching Boomer’s side, its mouth gaping and the strange symbol on its forehead blazing with light as it mutilated itself.

It used a blood-crusted cleaver to mangle it’s extended arm as it tried to touch Boomer’s side. It stood about eye level with Nat, who was standing on the back of her injured mech, which was itself nearly twelve feet tall.

Adrenaline screaming through her body, Nat reached out with the magnetic gloves and crushed a nearby car into a man-sized lump of steel and smashed the troll in the side, causing it to stumble as Boomer began sliding away at a controlled pace, sending up a spray of spark.

Boomer turned so that the gatling guns were facing the troll and unleashed a torrent of bullets, turning the giant’s knees into bloody swiss cheese and adding more propulsion to their low-speed escape.

More were coming.

Natalie was barely hanging on by her fingernails, using nearby debris and rusted cars to shove the berserking giants aside, barely enough space to breathe between close calls.

Eventually she spotted a garbage truck down an alleyway, and desperately reached out for it, watching the magnetic force on the HUD built into her contacts seize the massive lump of metal.

She hauled it back just in time to beat a leaping troll away from Boomer, flinging the giant up and into the distance.

***Homerun!***

Her HUD declared.

“This is not the time for jokes, Boomer.” Natalie gasped, making a collapsing motion and compressing the garbage truck into something a bit more solid.

It is exactly the time for jokes. You are twenty percent more efficient when you are in a flow state, and ‘having fun’. It could keep you alive.

“Alright, then,” Nat said between gasps of air. “Keep score.” She made a tugging motion and elongated the wad of green-painted metal into a rough approximation of a baseball bat.

She crushed a skull down into the earth and batted another one so hard that their neck made a ninety-degree angle. Her HUD made colorful numbers pop up beside each strike and add them to a running total.

Natalie didn’t want to admit it, but she was beginning to have fun.

The trolls got back up, put themselves back together, sometimes literally, and gave chase.

“I’m concerned about the size of the horde we’re trailing,” Natalie said, eyeballing the hundred or so wild-eyed trolls chasing after them, practically foaming at the mouth with rage. “How much time do we have left until the system reboots?”

In the bottom left of her HUD, 4:30 popped up right next to the score.

“I’ve only been doing this for thirty seconds!?” Natalie shouted, her heart sinking at the time remaining as she caught a troll diving from above on her giant makeshift club and flinging it aside.

“Applying PED’s.” Boomer said.

She felt a bit of cold press against her forehead as her helmet applied a stamp with Bargand’s Favor on it. A second later, her entire body tingled with a rush of joyous aggression.

“WHOOO!” Natalie couldn’t help but let out a howl of excitement despite the rapidly encroaching giants. “Bring it, bitches! Once I’m done with you, I’m gonna grab my friends and conquer them too-!”

A troll burst out of a nearby building, clouding her vision with dust and shrapnel.

She whipped the makeshift club sideways, but not before the monster’s bloody cleaver came down on her helmet.

The entire flight suit locked up and transferred the majority of the force of the blow down and into Boomer’s hull, but a portion of her helmet was sheared away, only sparing her eye by virtue of her rings and Bargand’s Favor.

“Pathetic!” Natalie hissed as the club caught the ambusher in the side and sent him spinning away.

“Behind you!” a human voice shouted from behind her, and Nat twisted to see…something odd.

Heather had wrapped herself around a troll approaching from her blind spot and was stabbing ethereal claws into the giant’s eyeballs, causing it to stumble and fall.

Heather jumped off the troll and floated through the air, landing beside her.

“What about the baby!?” Natalie demanded through the berserk haze of Bargand’s Favor

“I’m not really here. Well, I am here, but Anya’s body-sitting,” Wraith said with a shrug, still ghostly and ethereal. “Left side!” She pointed with an elongated talon at the Nat’s side of Boomer before darting to the other side and leaping off the cruising sled, diving ethereally into a troll’s chest before bursting out its back with the creature’s nervous system in tow.

The troll fell.

It didn’t get back up.

“Wow, these guys are easy!” Heather shouted as she dropped the oversized spine and brain, rebounding off a wall like a rubber ball before flying back onto Boomer’s hull.

“Speak for yourself, babe!” Nat said, smashing an approaching troll’s head into paste, only for it to reform, none the worse for wear. It raised interesting questions about how much of a troll’s nervous system had to be destroyed before they were no longer viable, but there wasn’t really much opportunity to experiment.

Removing all of it seemed to work, though.

***Paradox***

“Kill him.”

‘Or else I’ll Kill you’ Diplomacy has failed us, Perry thought sourly as the surrounding trolls began lumbering toward him, hefting all manner of weapons, both high and low tech.

DFT.EXE (Daxer’s Faux Teleportation)

Inside Perry’s armor, a flawless diamond cube had a tiny amount of paste made of Morpheus moth scales and Perry’s blood applied to one side.

That side was struck with a perfectly flat power stone, causing all the Morpheus scales to sublimate into Essence and travel through the diamond, splitting Perry’s image into three and rendering him temporarily invisible.

The trolls weren’t stupid; at least three of the dozen swung their weapons through the spot Perry had been standing, but without being able to see him, Perry had an easy time of dodging aside and relocating, his decoys copying his movements.

A wickedly smart or experienced individual would be able to compare the distance travelled by his mirror images during his movement, and apply it to his Last Known Location, getting his general position, but these trolls weren’t quite that quick on the draw, and he was busy hurting them.

BOOM!

Perry blinked anti-light out of his eyes as a beam of black energy ripped through reality, missing him by a couple feet and tearing a large chunk out of a nearby troll’s thigh.

The wounded troll ignored the wound and used the Tinker thrusters embedded in his skin to leap forward at unnatural speeds and deliver a wicked swing with a blade the length of a sports car through the room, in the general area where Perry was.

Perry leapt over the blade and considered his options.

This is going to take too long to finish them off.

Perry wanted to keep their leader alive long enough to get some answers out of him about the when/where/why/how and especially WHO of their demonic contract, but that would entail killing his dozen elites, and they would be difficult to kill individually.

All at once…dicey proposition. Perry didn’t want to be still stuck in the fight with an empty tank against unknown Tinker rays jutting out of roughly half the individual troll’s skin.

Better move would be to regroup…

HARDCASE!

The thought gave him a mental hiccup as he switched tracks.

I might be able to win, but in the time it took, they might kill Nat. Better to attack these guys from a more advantageous situation.

Missing Boomer’s heavy cannon as backup was particularly problematic.

“Time out!” Perry shouted, holding his hands apart.

Gretchen’s Idyllic Manifestation.

(0/1) remaining

Click.

Perry replaced their surroundings with a silo filled with aerosolized sodium.

The troll’s eyes widened as the water in their bodies began to violently react with the sodium, becoming sodium hydroxide in a burst of heat. Half of them fell to their knees, coughing out white hot fire as their lungs burned and the fat and oils in their body was converted to soap.

PPP.EXE x3

(0/6) remaining

Three nodules of webbing jumped out of Perry’s hands and exploded into inky black webbing wrapping themselves around the retching trolls and nullifying their regeneration.

In front of Perry’s eyes, their entire bodies shriveled and withered, turning into soap mummies.

The other trolls were already shrugging off the caustic environment, owing to their ridiculously fast regeneration, and Perry spotted Karth levelling Boomer’s primary cannon in his general direction.

Yep, now’s a good time.

BOOM!

Boomer’s canon caught Perry’s invisible shoulder with the bare edge of it’s blast, cutting a hole in the side of the pressurized silo and sending Perry tumbling backwards, slamming his back into the metal just outside the ring.

Perry rode the sudden depressurization and allowed it to shoot him tumbling out the side of the massive silo on a stream of aerosolized sodium.

With a mental tug, Perry pulled the three Perncious Prisons off their victims and used them to patch the hole in the side of the silo before they could chase him.

An instant later, Perry caught his balance and blasted away, aiming for Nat’s Last known.

BOOM!

Behind him, another explosion rocked the side of the metal silo, allowing the trolls to escape, but Perry had already left them in the dust.